The Arms of the Ocean Delivered Me
by Spinnd
Summary: 'But the child stares up with eyes of blue, coloured like the meeting of a sky and sea, deep like the stillness of a long misted lake, open like the heart that had loved and lost and has perhaps found reason to love again. And Bilbo thinks, yes, perhaps he has found reason to love again.' - In which Bilbo either believes in reincarnation, or thinks he's going mad.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Peter Jackson, New Line/Warner - they own it all.

**Warnings**: *Spoilers for The Hobbit: BOFA - if you don't know how the book ends. Major character deaths. All-round angst.

**A/N**: For a little HKM prompt wherein Frodo becomes the reincarnation of Thorin Oakenshield - only here rather ambiguously filled. Bagginshield, if you squint. Hope you all enjoy this!

* * *

There is nothing more to say when the last words are breathed into the space between them on the end of a choked off gasp. Death had come for claim, and time is a serpent's tail winding tight, inexorable as only the constant can be.

Hands claw and arms tremble, and blood gurgles up a ruined throat in one last fight for breath. There are smears all over the both of them, dark red and grey grime, but wearied eyes flicker open and they reflect in that summer sky blue, only now a sea of pain and _loss_.

_It's all right,_ he thinks to say, _it's all right, I'm here, I'm right here._

But no words form, as cobalt eyes dim and slide shut.

_If more of us valued food and cheer and song, above hoarded gold._

No, no more words.

Instead, he hums into the silence the tune of his childsong, that sung at his birth, an autumn song for a faunt born to russet trees and harvest fields.

_Farewell._

He cradles the body close until the blood warmth leeches out and turns to cold stone, crimson to alabaster, flesh to rock_._

Then, into rock, and under rock, to slumber evermore in grey veil and shadow.

He decides that he has had quite enough of mountains.

There is nothing more for him here; his world now lies ahead, there, over to the kindlier West. The roads may go on, but he has wandered far enough, strayed close enough to the edge, looked for and found more than he had ever wanted to. It is time to stop now, and to turn back.

He is quite ready for home.

_And your memories never fade._


	2. Chapter 2

_Mad Baggins,_ they say, and _poor ol' Baggins_, when he returns to the hills and hearth of his home, and his name carries along on the murmurs and outright stares. The looks burn and the whispers sting, but- _it's not them, Bilbo, it's you that's changed after all, and they're quite harmless, they don't mean to hurt you (anymore than you've already been)._

Company, he comes to decide, is best shared with himself. It could have been a lonely life, if he let it, but he learns to befriend the silence and fill it with unspoken words instead - in his head, and on the page, with the maps and letters scrawled onto parchment as much as they had once been drawn on his heart.

_Good morning,_ he tells himself each new day, and smiles when he hears no reply. He hums the tone of a travel song, one to which he'd never quite learnt the words for, as he potters around his quiet kitchen. The pantry is stocked again, in neat rows, the broken shelves thrown out and it does leave the larder that much more spacious, almost too much.

Bread and cheese, and porridge for second breakfast after. He nods approvingly, and lays out a table setting for one.

The morning comes and goes, just like every other morning. Afternoon finds him at his desk, quill in hand and ink staining his fingers, reading over words he's not quite sure were written by his own hand. He wonders if he should worry about these lapses, the gaps in his awareness, or that he seems to be tracing the same rune patterns into every page over and over and over again.

Evening brings little clarity, and his head is still muddled with unfamiliar scripts, except for when he turns a page and suddenly stops short, hands clutched around a crude sketch of a proud profile crowned with a diadem, dark blue ink turning its eyes almost black.

It goes into the fire. He watches the parchment crinkle and char, the face staring back at him through the flames.

He goes to bed with same thought, as he does every night.

_Perhaps they're right. Perhaps I am going mad._


	3. Chapter 3

There is little for him to note the passage of time. His face remains unlined, hair still thick with tawny curls, clothes well-pressed and buttons shining with the care he gives them, and the comforting weight in his pocket remains, soothing like a balm each time his finger caresses its smooth warm surface. Likewise outside, the village remains. The Mill and The Green Dragon and the markets bustling every Highday, and Hamfast, good Hamfast, who drops in every week to fix his garden and leaves the bag of Old Toby by his doorstep.

He forgets to count the days and the seasons, and lets them slip by. _You have to live in the present, for it is a gift_, his mother used to say. So live he does, in the here, in the now, and does not look back to what had been, and dares not look hence to what could be.

Until his door sounds with a knock one day; and it's not Hamfast because Hamfast knows never to ask for him, and it's not Lobelia because the door is still standing. It is a pleasant, if tentative, sort of knocking, and not at all expected.

_What are you doing?_ He asks himself as he presses his ear up against the cracks. _Just let them leave._ He could just let them go, he could. Why did it matter who they were, or why they had come? Why did it matter that he could let them in, brew some tea, and have some one, some other voice inside his home besides his own?

Then the door is open, by its accord if he believes himself, and the couple standing before him beams.

"Cousin Bilbo," Cousin Drogo had come all the way across the Brandywine to say, and hefts the bundle in his arms. "Meet our son."

Black hair peeks from under swaddling cloth, and the little face is scrunching up, making ready to cry. He takes a step back, bracing for a piercing scream.

But it is merely a yawn in the end, and then the lines soften, round out, as the child blinks open his eyes.

Blue eyes. Blue summer sky eyes. Azure now in the morning light, but perhaps they would darken at duskfall, deepening to a midnight lake with flecks like stars caught in the still mirror sheen. Perhaps they would lighten aquamarine when caught in the lift of a smile, or spark amber on indigo when in the throes of anger, or shadow almost-black when concealing hidden hurts, doubt and despair spilling from their abyss.

Perhaps he is imagining, here, that they fix upon him now in that same familiar gaze that bores straight into his soul.

So he stares down at the child and dares not step back, for fear he might end up flat on the floor, the strength is trickling from his legs and he may not remain upright for very long.

"This is your uncle, Frodo," his mother chuckles as she strokes the babe's hair, and Cousin Drogo laughs along and pulls him closer to them.

He knows now that he must, he must try. So he musters a breath and leans forward above the child, freezing his face into a smile as he tries to put voice to words, for the first time in a long, long time.

"My dear Frodo."


	4. Chapter 4

He doesn't see them again, Drogo and Primula. They had promised to keep in touch, but Brandybuck Hall is far away, by Hobbit standards, and the letters they write had not been as detailed or frequent as they could have been - and when over the years life moved on and they lapsed in their writing, so had he.

The news comes as a shock to all in the shire; and a nasty business, drowning. _(Not as bad as burning, though, nothing is as bad.)_ He feels a ghosting surge of anger when their deaths had been announced, the injustice and its sheer indiscriminate nature rankling sourly, but his thoughts then turn from the shocked masses to the silent boy, an orphan now, like him.

Frodo, barely twelve and yet too small, looking desperately lost in the crowd of his own relatives.

He strides over decisively, and places his hand on a bony shoulder. The child looks up at him, and there are those eyes again, coloured like the meeting of a sky and sea, and he ignores the pang in his chest at its alien familiarity.

_You're imagining things again, Bilbo Baggins._

Instead, he cards a hand through thick black curls (_no shocks of grey, no silver beads, no coarse braids, just soft and curled like a perfectly normal Hobbit) _and stops everyone short with his best glares and an emphatic speech about "the boy needs a guardian" and "you've done nothing but scare him right off", and "of course I'm taking him home with me, I'm the sanest one among the lot of you."

He marches off with Frodo trailing behind him uncertainly, and neither of them looks back.


	5. Chapter 5

He isn't the best with people, of that he is well aware, much less children, who are really just louder, messier, littler, people. Bag End had never been a place for younglings - his own memories of its halls and gardens reaching back only as far as his tweens - and his parents, dearly departed far too early, had never borne another after him. He had thus grown up with adults, surrounded by their talk and toasting and found them far more enjoyable than the raucous hubbub of overexcited faunts, and he had always wondered (_still does_) if he had missed some formative life phase wherein one learnt the simple joys of being a child.

In short, he is standing now at the threshold of the round open door, clutching a smaller, softer hand in his, and wondering if he's not just made the biggest mistake of his life.

He knows little of being with children, even less of raising one. Beyond the basics - food, bed, bath, stop them from breaking something - he can scarcely predict what he would be expected to provide his little nephew, and something much like guilt worms its way into his thoughts.

_Poor boy, what did he do to deserve being stuck here with his mad old Uncle._

The small hand squeezes, startling him. He looks down to find Frodo staring up him shyly.

"I think I'll like it, living here with you."

He finds enough of himself to smile back with a hum. _I very much hope you will,_ he thinks, and crosses the threshold, remembering the last time he had let a dark-haired blue-eyed being through his front door and into his life.


	6. Chapter 6

Frodo is thankfully, or worryingly, not like the other Hobbit children. He is quieter, solemn, almost lonesome. Lost in his own thoughts most of the time, and when he's not, he studies his surroundings with rather unusual, almost wary, intent.

He had wondered, at first, if they were merely manifestations of trauma - losing parents, at any age, was a devastating blow. But then Frodo starts dreaming in the nights, screaming from his nightmares, and yes, he had seen his parents' deaths with his own eyes but that had been a boat sinking in a stormy lake, and not a fire raging through their home, flames so hot they melted brick and bone.

_'It burns, help us, put it out!'_ The boy cries out, night after night, and the words make his blood freeze and the gold in his pocket burn with a dull throbbing heat. But each time he races to the bedroom to try and rouse his ward, the cries would stop and the small form would settle, and never once do the nightmares actually wake him.

"Was it a dragon? In your dreams?" He asks one day, when they're both reading in his study. But Frodo only replies with a frown and a slow tilt of his head, and a bemused question: "What dreams?"

Frodo turns thirteen on a balmy September day, and just like that, he stops dreaming.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: Bit of a strange chapter that didn't quite want to come together, but hope it works. Thanks for the reads and reviews! **

* * *

He made the mistake of showing Frodo his maps once, and the lad's been enraptured ever since. The love of stories must be hereditary too, though he'd like to think in no small part, his prowess with mimicry and grandiose gesticulations had something to do with it.

"Tell me the part about the trolls again," the boy cajoles, fourteen and much too big to be squeezing into the old rickety armchair with him.

Sixteen, and the tween carries on his studies of Rhovanion maps with distinct purpose. He wonders if he imagines it, seeing some hidden spark alight in those summer eyes at the sight of the single Mount, standing proud, with the curling dragonform sketched above its peak.

He turns a hundred years old on Frodo's twenty-second birthday, and it's a big celebration for both Bagginses, filled with the noise and cheer one expects from big parties. Still, come the late hour back in the quiet of their home, the lad who settles down next to him is pensive and almost-sad as they watch the fire crackle in the hearth.

He is drifting off, dozily, when he just about catches the strains of a long-forgotten tune humming around the edge of his sleep. Blinks, half-awake and bewildered, and only sees his boy staring silently into the flames.

* * *

It will be another five years before Frodo comes of age, but his nephew is already master of the house if the market whispers are to be believed. The hobbits watch as the boy dutifully fills his baskets with village produce every Highday. See the lad out in the garden, cheerily chatting away with Gaffer Gamgee as they work the turnip patch. Hear the younglings, Frodo among them, carouse at the Inn, dancing on table tops and upsetting the pints - and customers. All the while, while his uncle shuts himself away and buries his head in his maps and his books.

Seems there might be a respectable Baggins at Bag End after all.

And while Frodo is still unable to maintain the usual Hobbity paunch, being all gangly limbs and angular features, his legs are slender and smooth, his palms soft and free from callouses, back unmarred and unmarked. Shoulders light and heart joyfully free and it's getting harder each passing day to see the similarities for that which is not.

Strange thoughts in a strange head, and who knows why. Grief, he thinks, for if he's truthful, he'd say he is still grieving.

The boy smiles like the other had never before, and he is certain now (as if he never had been before) that no, his boy will not know of the other life, will not live the other life of pain and loss and madness.

He watches his boy grow up, and wonders about another, who had once been a boy, who grew up a prince, who never grew to be a king.

_Perhaps he could have been, in a different life. He could have been young and bright and beautiful too._


	8. Chapter 8

Eleventy-one. _Eleventy-one._ A milestone marked by cards and letters, food crates and ale barrels, banners beneath the Party Tree, and strictly _no admittance except on party business._

Then Gandalf arrives on his doorstep - so perhaps yes, admittance, too, for very old friends - with the smell of flint and fireworks hanging in the air, and Frodo is smiling. _Laughing._

All his adventures, and heartbreak, feel like a lifetime ago.

But there is still that call, deep within his bones, a whisper once that is now grown into less of a clamour and more of a song that winds itself in and around his heart (like it had been, at the very start, at the beginning of all things).

"You mean to go, then?" Gandalf asks him suddenly, over tea and eggs, and something about the Grey Wizard's question startles an answer out of him.

"Yes." He frowns, somewhat surprised at the word, but when he opens his mouth again, there are only more words. "I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, the mountains..."

_The Lonely Mountain._

He thinks Frodo would want to see it too. But no, Frodo's place is here. Here, in the green hills and little rivers. Not in cold lakes and dark mountain tombs. Peace and quiet, and good-tilled earth is all the boy needs; he should not need to know of blood and death and (any more) loss.

His fingers tremble around his tea cup, and he chalks it down, as he often does these days, to age and nerves. Tiredness, perhaps. Years that stretched on, perhaps like they were never meant to. Spread, like butter over too much bread.

The worries ease in the haze of the pipeweed, however, and he lets the smoke lull him in that familiar way, slipping his thoughts into the evening dusk. He catches Gandalf's eye, twinkling, unchanging.

Yes. He is quite ready for another adventure.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N**: An update long time coming. Thanks everyone who is _still_ reading!

* * *

All things said, it was a good party, and if not good, then at least a most memorable one. The gasps, the cries, and oh, _their faces_!

A fitting exit, he smiles to himself, chuckling quietly as he hopped up the stone steps. The whole shire had been waiting these past fifty years for proof of his madness, and he supposes he'd given them it tonight. He slips through his door, feeling his heart race a little with the thrill of the run - he's missed this, yes, the danger and excitement and sheer uncertainty of every next step that left the Tookish side of him exhilarated.

'He who walks unseen.' He grins at the memory, and can almost feel the gold shifting beneath his feet once more, furnace-hot breath ghosting across his face. 'Ring-winner. Luck-wearer. Barrel-rider.'

_Thief in the shadows._

_Thief. Liar. _

_Miserable hobbit!_

He pulls the ring off with a gasp, and his feet are on firm stone ground once more, the dizzying vertigo of hanging over a sharp cliff edge (_staring into_ _cold eyes grey with gold-madness, dragon-sickness) _dissipating as soon as it had come.

"That ring of yours," a voice comes from the darkened hallway, and he nearly drops it in fright if not for the innate recognisability of that chiding tone.

"Come now, Gandalf, it was just a bit of fun."

The dimming torchlight makes his Wizard friend loom even bigger. "A magic ring is not _fun_, Bilbo Baggins, and none of them should be used lightly."

Of course Gandalf had always been one for dramatics, he harrumphs and grumbles, and in the end he hands over his ring tucked into an envelope. "Here. You see that Frodo gets this. Never know when it might come in useful."

The knapsack and walking stick are readied and he's almost out the door, when a large hand claps him warmly on the shoulder.

"The ring is still in your pocket."

The words come with a rush of feelings, only, not quite feelings. Deeper than mere feeling, harder, fiercer, coming from his gut, pulling and twisting, a rush of sudden panic that makes him close his fist around the weight still in his pocket and he would never let go, never let it go, no, _no no mine it's mine mine my own my own my-_

_Precious._

The world is cast in red and gold, and it's as if he's back in the Mountain again, except this time the heat is burning in _his_ belly and the words heating behind his teeth taste of ash.

When the crimson field finally recedes from his vision, the door is solid against his back, and the little band of gold lies cold and harmless on the floor before him.

"Well." He takes a breath as if coming up for air. "Well."

Then turns around, and heads out, and doesn't look back.


	10. Chapter 10

He had meant to make it beyond The Last Homely House. He had taken the exact route out of The Shire as he (_they_) had the last (_first_) time, out of Bywater and along the Great East Road, over the Edge of the Wild and across the Ford of Bruinen. Down the cliffs, into the valley of Imladris, and once past some invisible threshold he had been almost immediately set upon by twin laughing faces and a chorus of greetings.

Elrond's twins; centuries old, but still the Half-Elven's sons, which meant they were at times most unlike their solemn, regal father. Their kinsmen were more serene in their receiving of him, and it had gladdened his heart to see familiar faces among the crowd of ethereal beings gathered in -

"My welcome?" He had asked, noting the feasting table and the gaggle of minstrels and Elrond's quiet smile. "All this for me?"

"You are Elf-friend," Elrond merely said, and that name made him recall another Fair Being, silver and stern against a backdrop of red tents and grey mud.

_Elf-friend,_ he had been that day. And _Dwarrow-friend_ too, perhaps, though he would gladly give the title back if it meant never having to hear that farewell pass from pale bloodied lips.

That night, he looked at himself in the mirror, and knew that he would not see the Mountain again.

He had meant to make it beyond Elrond's House, further east of Mirkwood, and into Dale and Laketown and finally, finally, to Erebor. But that is no longer his journey now.

He still wonders what had really stopped him, that day; the terror of what he would find, or the horror of what he had already found.

* * *

He writes, as he had always done, to pass the time. His fingers no longer grip the quill as well, and he now burns twice the number of candles (and almost sets his manuscript alight on three separate occasions) to aid his eyes, but his strokes are sure and true still - in Common or Elvish or Cirth Runes.

It takes him a little under five months to finish his book. Keeping mostly to himself in his quarters had given him the space to put in the finishing touches, as well as keeping his then unfinished writings from the prying eyes of that nosy Elf - Elladan, or Elrohir, he can never remember, nor tell them apart. At least their sister could be counted on to remain sensible in these matters.

The red leather is warm in the sunlight that streams in from high arched windows, as he reaches over to open it.

_There and Back Again_, he reads, silently, proudly. _A Hobbit's Tale_ _by Bilbo Baggins_

He flips the pages absently - he needs no reminders, knows every page of this book intimately. Knows that as much as he had tried to fill it, that there were pages still left un-inked and empty of any memories or thoughts. Not that he is entirely surprised; he had left a long enough trail of crumpled sheafs before he finally had come to the understanding that some things were just not meant to be said, in written word or otherwise. That some things were just not meant to be remembered, were not meant for him to remember.

He runs a hand over the first blank page when at the moment, the idea that strikes him makes him smile.

A smile that is, as usual, most abruptly and rudely interrupted by the appearance of that confounded Grey Wizard. Followed shortly by an entire troop of Men, Elves and Hobbits, bearing with them the small limp figure of his nephew.


	11. Chapter 11

He keeps vigil over Frodo, lying silent and wounded in a too-large bed, and it is all too familiar - nauseatingly so. Bandages and sheets white against pale skin. Elvish healers in their calm, lilting voices. The smell of herbs crushed into steaming water, yielding pungent brews and sticky poultices.

A Nazgul blade, the Ranger had said. A stab to the shoulder. One wound.

Not axe-wound upon spear-wound upon bites and gashes and shattered bones - he reminds himself, repeatedly.

Frodo sleeps for four days, a peaceful, untroubled sleep, and that is one more thing he can be grateful for.

It is in the early hours of the fifth day, that he feels his own exhaustion creep up on him, and he cannot recall how he gets from the chair to his own bed. Still, a large warm hand on his brow lulls him into a slumber, and he only awakens late in the afternoon to the high chatter of Hobbit voices and a soft, familiar laugh.

He staggers out the door and into the bright sunshine of the balcony, and his eyes are most certainly failing him, for he does not see any sign of his boy until his arms are full of him.

"Bilbo!"

He returns the embrace equally fiercely.

"My dear Frodo," he says. A sound escapes him, and he hopes he is laughing.

* * *

They have one day. One day of peace, of bliss, and reminiscing.

He spends it with Frodo, who thumbs the well-worn pages of his Red Book, and it is as if the lad is fourteen again, sitting by the hearth enraptured by the tales of his uncle's adventures. And it is good to hear him laughing once more.

Dusk comes quicker than he anticipated, though possibly just in time as they come to the last pages of his writings. They had never reached the end of the stories in all these years, and he always kept his recollections brief and sketchy. No need for details, he had thought, everyone knows what happened. Best that it is remembered in silence - the Battle in the shadow of the Mountain.

Frodo gazes at the drawings, roughly, crudely inked onto the parchment. The Changeling Bear and the Eagles, an Elven archer in flowing steel, a Dwarven soldier with a readied spear facing down warg and rider.

Flip of a page, and it is the Mountain, proud and cold. Below her, three tombs and a fallen statue. Next to that, a large white stone.

"You remember," Frodo says, then, almost as if he had believed otherwise. "You remember everything."

And his throat tightens, as if a hand (_two hands, large, rough, hot - burning - so hot_) had wrapped around his neck and squeezed, and he gags on the memory.

"Yes," is all he can give, when he finally does. Stares at the young hobbit before him, long-buried questions re-surfacing once more: _I remember - those who survived, those who did not._

_But do you?_

He starts as Frodo suddenly draws back, as if burned, hand flying to his shoulder and clutches there tight. He makes to hurry to retrieve a Healer, but the boy stops him.

"I'm fine, Bilbo, it - it just hurts a little. It's been a long day. I suppose I should be resting more."

It is with a wan smile that Frodo takes leave, still clutching gingerly at the shoulder that bears no mark of a Morgul wound.


End file.
